A Financial Planner has called for the Government to avoid further tinkering with pensions and wants to see “more common sense” ahead of the Budget on Wednesday.
Parminder Bains, CFP^CM, Principal of PSB Wealth in London, said he felt there had been enough changes over the past year and more would merely confuse consumers.

He called for “less politics and more common sense”.

His message to George Osborne was: “Keep things simple, think more about the consumer. We want people to save, let’s make that easy.

“The more clarity we have and the less tinkering we have the better it’s going to be for clients.

“I don’t want to see any more changes, we’ve already had a massive impact from last year.”

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He said with another Budget coming around so soon and speculation over matters like the possible reduction in the top rate of tax from 45% to 40% it left people with “uncertainty and less clarity”.

He believes some people have come to distrust pensions as a savings vehicle as the rules become more complex and this had created a “disincentive to save”.

He said: “It’s frustrating, I guess, because there’s a huge gap between what the politicians say we can do and what the clients want to do and we’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Mr Bains also raised concerns over what he called “too much regulation”.

He said: “I was talking to a colleague the other day and he said he thinks we’re the most over regulated industry on the whole planet.

“That’s how I feel sometimes, especially with pensions. It’s just a pensions piggy bank and politicians keep digging their hands into it, it doesn’t help.

“Regulation is important but what I’m finding on a day to day basis there’s such a large amount of increase in terms of what we need to do for compliance.

“I’m finding it’s taking longer to get from A to B. That’s a bit of a challenge and that environment, I think, is only going to increase over time.”

There have been calls for an independent pensions commission to make long term savings policy and to take it out of the control of politicians.

Mr Bains would back this but raised doubts as to whether the Government of the day would implement its recommendations.